Analysis, design, and implementation of an improved gate driver for high switching frequency EV application

Abstract

Electric vehicle (EV) battery chargers operate from moderate switching frequency (MSF) to high switching frequency(HSF) to achieve high power density. To operate the HSF power electronic devices, the selection of gate drivers and itsassociated components is crucial. Laboratory developed gate driver circuits (GDCs) often fail to drive these HSF devicesadequately due to noise vulnerability, PWM duty loss and common-mode currents. Further, at MSF and HSF ranges, the gateto-source terminals of the device are subjected to high voltages due to unwanted noise resulting in false turn-on of the switchleading to the converter failure. In this paper, firstly, an improved GDC and it's associated component selection criteria areproposed for HSF EV application. The proposed GDC is simple in structure with minor components; thus, it is cost-effective andhighly reliable. Secondly, the proposed GDC is compared with the other commercially available competent GDCs. Power losses,cost and dynamic switching performance are the figures-of-merit for the quantitative assessment. From the comparison, it will beshown that the proposed GDC exhibits an overall superior performance among the popular GDCs. Finally, the distinctivefeatures of the proposed GDC are experimentally validated for several test cases and the obtained results are presented.